Articles by Jacob London

According to recent estimates, 1.65 million American households are now living in “extreme poverty” — trying to survive on less than $2 per person per day — despite the national recovery from recession. The number of such households has doubled since 1996.

This past Sunday marked the launch of the MIT Bitcoin Project, a study conducted by faculty and students from the Media Lab, Sloan, and the MIT Bitcoin Club. The study aims to understand how the digital currency proliferates after being distributed to potential users.

On June 10, David Brat, an unknown professor of economics at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, shocked the American political establishment by defeating House majority leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia’s seventh Congressional district.

As scientists and engineers, MIT students constantly balance harsh realism with eternal optimism. On the one hand, we must be machines — poring over facts, figures, and data, determining what is infeasible, and eliminating it. On the other, we must maintain unwavering faith in the possibilities of discovery and the limitless potential of imagination. While we’re here, one of the most important lessons we learn is how to grapple with this duality — how to keep the faith despite setbacks. We learn to be resilient.

In Friday’s issue of The Tech, Madeline O’Grady ’16 asserts that MIT students should be “better than the career fair.” Instead of settling for comfortable, lucrative jobs with corporations, she writes, we should aspire to solve the world’s most challenging problems.

When I was growing up, I had the privilege of listening to Dave Niehaus — the best broadcaster to ever call a baseball game — animate the ups and downs of the Seattle Mariners on long summer nights. I only realized how good I had it after I moved across the country, and had to rely on a virtual tool to provide game updates. As a pitch comes in, a red, green, or blue dot will indicate either a strike, ball, or ball in play. Balls put in play are followed by a neutral, and technical description of the action.

With just a few days remaining before the election, and with the presidential candidates locked in a dead heat, polls suggest that the outcome will depend on the last-minute decisions of a handful of voters who are still undecided, especially in critical swing states. Sampling in various polls also indicates that among likely voters, the economy will be the overriding issue.